EU to mobilise €200 billion for AI investment

Europe will mobilise €200bn euro for investment in artificial intelligence, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced at the AI Action Summit in Paris today. 

Of this, €20bn will be earmarked for AI gigafactories, which, according to the Commission, is needed to allow for “collaborative development” the most complex AI models. 

The announcement comes on the heels of French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement on Sunday of a €109 billion investment plan for AI projects in France in the coming years. Macron said the investment is “the equivalent for France of what the US has announced with ‘Stargate’,” referring to OpenAI’s $500-billion programme.

Von der Leyen said that she wants “AI to be a force for good and for growth”.

“We are doing this through our own European approach – based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent. But our approach still needs to be supercharged. This is why, together with our member states and with our partners, we will mobilise unprecedented capital through InvestAI for European AI gigafactories,” she added.

Last month, newly installed US President Donald Trump announced a joint venture, with Stargate, OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the country. The joint venture team will set up a separate company, deploying $100bn (€96bn) immediately and increasing the investment up to $500bn (€480bn) over the coming four years. 

AI factories

The Commission announced seven initial AI factories in December and will soon announce the next five. The gigafactories will have around 100,000 last-generation AI chips, around four times more than the AI factories currently being set up. The aim is that companies, including smaller ones, can access large-scale computing power for future development.

Last year, French AI developer Mistral AI warned about the high demand for using supercomputer facilities to train models.

The gigafactories funded through InvestAI aims to be the largest public-private partnership in the world for the development of trustworthy AI, according to the EU executive. The Commission’s initial funding for InvestAI will come from existing EU funding programmes which have a digital component, such as the Digital Europe Programme, Horizon Europe, and InvestEU.

EU member states can also contribute by committing investment from existing earmarked cohesion funds.

Funding of AI gigafactories with a mix of grants and equity will serve as one of the pilot cases for strategic technologies announced in the EU’s Competitiveness Compass, its strategy for boosting growth.